360° Video of Goose in Love With Car Shows Why All Local News Should Be 360°

Reader, I will admit that I was skeptical when I first started watching this video. I assumed a local news station was just using a gimmicky new technique to jazz up a ho-hum story. I was wrong. I was so wrong.

Read more…



Source: Gizmodo – 360° Video of Goose in Love With Car Shows Why All Local News Should Be 360°

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti will launch for $699 “next week”

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments



Source: Ars Technica – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti will launch for 9 “next week”

NVIDIA reveals its $700 top of the line GTX 1080 Ti

Last year we called NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 “the upgrade you’ve been waiting for,” and now PC gamers have another high-end graphics card to drool over. Now, at GDC 2017 CEO Jen-Hsun Huang presented its successor, the GTX 1080 Ti, which promises “35…

Source: Engadget – NVIDIA reveals its 0 top of the line GTX 1080 Ti

The Sistine Chapel's masterpiece frescoes have been digitized

To prepare for future restoration projects, the Sistine Chapel’s world-famous frescoes and mosaic floor have gotten the up-close-and-personal treatment by way of an army of DSLRs. The last time the Sistine’s masterworks were documented photographical…

Source: Engadget – The Sistine Chapel’s masterpiece frescoes have been digitized

NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 1080 Ti: Available Week of March 5th for $699

In what has now become a bona fide tradition for NVIDIA, at their GDC event this evening the company announced their next flagship video card, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Something of a poorly kept secret – NVIDIA’s website accidentally spilled the beans last week – the GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA’s big Pascal refresh for the year, finally rolling out their most powerful consumer GPU, GP102, into a GeForce video card.


The Ti series of cards isn’t new for NVIDIA. The company has used the moniker for their higher-performance cards since the GTX 700 series back in 2013. However no two generations have really been alike. For the Pascal generation in particular, NVIDIA has taken the almighty Titan line in a more professional direction, so whereas a Ti card would be a value Titan in past generations – and this is still technically true here – it serves as more of a flagship for the Pascal generation GeForce.


At any rate, we knew that NVIDIA would release a GP102 card for the GeForce market sooner or later, and at long last it’s here. Based on a not-quite-fully-enabled GP102 GPU (more on this in a second), like its predecessors the GTX 1080 Ti is meant to serve as a mid-generation performance boost for the high-end video card market. In this case NVIDIA is aiming for what they’re calling their greatest performance jump yet for a Ti product – around 35% on average – which would translate into a sizable upgrade for GeForce GTX 980 Ti owners and others for whom GTX 1080 wasn’t the card they were looking for.























NVIDIA GPU Specification Comparison
  GTX 1080 Ti NVIDIA Titan X GTX 1080 GTX 980 Ti
CUDA Cores 3584 3584 2560 2816
Texture Units 224 224 160 176
ROPs 88 96 64 96
Core Clock ? 1417MHz 1607MHz 1000MHz
Boost Clock 1600MHz 1531MHz 1733MHz 1075MHz
TFLOPs (FMA) 11.5 TFLOPs 11 TFLOPs 9 TFLOPs 6.1 TFLOPs
Memory Clock 11Gbps GDDR5X 10Gbps GDDR5X 10Gbps GDDR5X 7Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width 352-bit 384-bit 256-bit 384-bit
VRAM 11GB 12GB 8GB 6GB
FP64 1/32 1/32 1/32 1/32
FP16 (Native) 1/64 1/64 1/64 N/A
INT8 4:1 4:1 N/A N/A
TDP 250W 250W 180W 250W
GPU GP102 GP102 GP104 GM200
Transistor Count 12B 12B 7.2B 8B
Die Size 471mm2 471mm2 314mm2 601mm2
Manufacturing Process TSMC 16nm TSMC 16nm TSMC 16nm TSMC 28nm
Launch Date 03/2017 08/02/2016 05/27/2016 06/01/2015
Launch Price $699 $1200 MSRP: $599

Founders $699
$649

We’ll start as always with the GPU at the heart of the card, GP102. With NVIDIA’s business now supporting a dedicated compute GPU – the immense GP100 – GP102 doesn’t qualify for the “Big Pascal” moniker like past iterations have. But make no mistake, GP102 is quite a bit larger than the GP104 GPU at the heart of the GTX 1080, and that translates to a lot more hardware for pushing pixels.



GTX 1080 Ti ships with 28 of GP102’s 30 SMs enabled. For those of you familiar with the not-quite-consumer NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal), this is the same configuration as that card, and in fact there are a lot of similarities between those two cards. Though for this generation the situation is not going to be cut & dry as in the past; the GTX 1080 Ti is not strictly a subset of the Titan.


The big difference on the hardware front is that NVIDIA has stripped GP102 of some of its memory/ROP/L2 capacity, which was fully enabled on the Titan. Of the 96 ROPs we get 88; the last ROP block, its memory controller, and 256KB of L2 cache have been disabled.



However what the GTX 1080 Ti lacks in functional units it’s partially making up in clockspeeds, both in regards to the core and the memory. While the base clock has not yet been disclosed, the boost clock of the GTX 1080 Ti is 1.6GHz, about 70MHz higher than its Titan counterpart. More significantly, the memory clock on the GTX 1080 Ti is 11Gbps, a 10% increase over the 10Gbps clock found on the Titan and the GTX 1080. Combined with the 352-bit memory bus, and we’re looking at 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth for the GTX 1080 Ti.



Taken altogether then, the GTX 1080 Ti offers just shy of 11.5 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. This puts the expected shader/texture performance of the card 29% ahead of the current GTX 1080, while the ROP throughput advantage stands 27%, and memory bandwidth at a much greater 51.2%. Real-world performance will of course be influenced by a blend of these factors, so I’ll be curious to see how much the major jump in memory bandwidth helps given that the ROPs aren’t seeing the same kind of throughput boost. Otherwise, relative to the NVIDIA Titan X, the two cards should end up quite close, trading blows now and then.


Speaking of the Titan, on an interesting side note, it doesn’t look like NVIDIA is going to be doing anything to hurt the compute performance of the GTX 1080 Ti to differentiate the card from the Titan, which has proven popular with GPU compute customers. Crucially, this means that the GTX 1080 Ti gets the same 4:1 INT8 performance ratio of the Titan, which is critical to the cards’ high neural networking inference performance. As a result the GTX 1080 Ti actually has slighty greater compute performance (on paper) than the Titan. And NVIDIA has been surprisingly candid in admitting that unless compute customers need the last 1GB of VRAM offered by the Titan, they’re likely going to buy the GTX 1080 Ti instead.



Speaking of memory, as I mentioned before the card will be shipping with 11 pieces of 11Gbps GDDR5X. The faster memory clock comes courtesy of a new generation of GDDR5X memory chips from partner Micron, who after a bit of a rocky start with GDDR5X development, is finally making progress on boosting memory speeds that definitely has NVIDIA pleased. Until now NVIDIA’s GPUs and boards have been ready for the higher frequency memory, and the memory is just now catching up.


Moving on, the card’s 250W TDP should not come as a surprise. This has been NVIDIA’s segment TDP of choice for Titan and Ti cards for a while now, and the GTX 1080 Ti isn’t deviating from that.



However the cooling system has seen a small but important overhaul: the DVI port is gone, opening up the card to be a full slot blower. In order to offer a DVI port along with a number of DisplayPorts/HDMI ports, NVIDIA has traditionally blocked part of the card’s second slot to house the DVI port. But with GTX 1080 Ti, that port is finally gone, and that gives the GTX 1080 Ti the interesting distinction being the first unobstructed high-end GeForce card since the GTX 580. The end result is that NVIDIA is promising a decent increase in cooling performance relative to the GTX 980 Ti and similar designs. We’ll have to see how NVIDIA has tuned the card to understand the full impact of this change, but this likely will further improve on NVIDIA’s already great acoustics.


Meanwhile the end result of removing the DVI port means that the GTX 1080 Ti’s display I/O has been pared down to just a mix of HDMI and DisplayPorts. Altogether we’re looking at 3x DisplayPort 1.4 ports and 1x HDMI 2.0 port. As a consolation to owners who may still be using DVI-based monitors, the company will be including a DisplayPort to DVI adapter with the card (presumably DP to SL-DVI and not DL-DVI), but it’s clear that DVI’s days are now numbered over at NVIDIA.


Moving on, for card designs NVIDIA is once again going to be working with partners to offer a mix of reference and custom designs. The GTX 1080 Ti will initially be offered in a Founder’s Edition design, while partners are also bringing up their own semi and fully custom designs to be released a bit later. Importantly however, unlike the GTX 1080 & GTX 1070, NVIDIA has done away with the Founder’s Edition premium for the GTX 1080 Ti. The MSRP of the card will be the MSRP for both the Founder’s Edition and partners’ custom cards. This makes pricing more consistent, though I’m curious to see how this plays out with partners, as they benefitted from the premium in the form of more attractive pricing for their own cards.



Finally, speaking of pricing, let’s talk about the launch date and availability. Just in time for Pi Day, NVIDIA will be launching the card on the week of March 5th (an exact date has yet to be revealed). As for pricing, long-time price watchers may be surprised. NVIDIA will be releasing the card at $699, the old price of the GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition (which itself just got a price cut). This does work out to a bit higher than the GTX 980 Ti – it launched at $649 two years ago – but it’s more aggressive than I had been expecting given the GTX 1080’s launch price last year.


In any case, at this time the high-end video card market is NVIDIA’s to command. AMD doesn’t offer anything competitive with the GTX 1070 and above, so the GTX 1080 Ti will stand alone at the top of the consumer video card market. Long-term here AMD isn’t hesitating to note their work on Vega, but that’s a bridge to be crossed only once those cards get here.




Source: AnandTech – NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 1080 Ti: Available Week of March 5th for 9

GeForce GTX 1080 Price Cut to $499; NVIDIA Partners To Begin Selling 10-Series Cards With Faster Memory

Along with this evening’s new of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA has a couple other product announcements of sorts. First off, starting tomorrow, the GeForce GTX 1080 is getting an official $100 price cut, bringing the card’s price to $499. Since the card launched back in May at $599, prices for the card have held fairly steady around that MSRP. So once this price cut goes into effect, it will have a significant effect on card prices. Though it should be noted that the price here is the base price for vendor custom cards; the Founder’s Edition card was not mentioned. If it maintains its $100 premium, then that card would be coming down to $599.


As for the second announcement of the evening, NVIDIA has announced that their partners are going to be selling GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 6GB cards with faster memory. Partners will now have the option to outfit these cards with 11Gbps GDDR5X and 9Gbps GDDR5 respectively, to be sold as factory overclocked cards.


To understand the change, let’s talk briefly about how board partners work. Depending on the partner, the parts, and the designs, partners can buy anything from just the GPU, to the GPU and RAM, up to a fully assembled board (the Founder’s Edition). With the release of faster GDDR5X and GDDR5 bins, NVIDIA is now giving their board partners an additional option to use these faster memories.






GeForce 10 Series Memory Clocks
  GTX 1080 GTX 1060
Official Memory Clock 10Gbps GDDR5X 8Gbps GDDR5
New “Overclock” Memory Clock 11Gbps GDDR5X 9Gbps GDDR5

To be clear, NVIDIA isn’t releasing a new formal SKU for either card. Nor are the cards’ official specifications changing. However, if partners would like, they can now buy higher speed memory from NVIDIA for use in their cards. The resulting products will, in turn, be sold as factory overclocked cards, giving partners more configuration options for their factory overclocked SKUs.


As factory overclocking has always been done at the partner level, this doesn’t change the nature of the practice. Partners have, can, and will sell cards with factory overclocked GPUs and memory, with or without NVIDIA’s help. However with NVIDIA’s official specs already driving the memory clocks so hard, there hasn’t been much headroom left for partners to play with; factory overclocked GTX 1080 cards don’t ship much above 10.2Gbps. So the introduction of faster memory finally opens up greater memory overclocking to the partners.




Source: AnandTech – GeForce GTX 1080 Price Cut to 9; NVIDIA Partners To Begin Selling 10-Series Cards With Faster Memory

A New Video Shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Arguing With a Driver Over Fares

A new video published by Bloomberg shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with an Uber driver over fares. It all started when one of Kalanick’s “companions” appears to say that she’s heard that Uber is having a hard year. Bloomberg reports: That pleasant conversation between Kalanick and his friends in the back of an Uber Black? It devolved into a heated argument over Uber’s fares between the CEO and his driver, Fawzi Kamel, who then turned over a dashboard recording of the conversation to Bloomberg. Kamel, 37, has been driving for Uber since 2011 and wants to draw attention to the plight of Uber drivers. The video shows off Kalanick’s pugnacious personality and short temper, which may cause some investors to question whether he has the disposition to lead a $69 billion company with a footprint that spans the globe. Uber declined to comment on the video. Here’s part of the conversation:
Travis Kalanick: “So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months.”
Fawzi Kamel: “It’s good.”
Kalanick: “You probably saw some email.”
Kamel: “I saw the email [says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices.”
Kalanick: “We’re not dropping the prices on black.”
Kamel: “But in general.”
Kalanick: “In general but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business.”
Kamel: “Competitors? You had the business model in your hands you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride.”

You can read the transcript of the conversation here via Recode.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – A New Video Shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Arguing With a Driver Over Fares

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader run community: The Second Series Curse • The Mush

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader run community: The Second Series Curse The Mushroom News: Naruto Live Action Producers Working Hard On Diversity Discussion: Nintendo Virtual Console  

Read more…



Source: Kotaku – Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader run community: The Second Series Curse • The Mush

In the Latest Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Trailer, Star-Lord Meets His Dad

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 premiered a brand new trailer tonight. It’s got space battles, dancing, and more Rocket gadgets. Plus, we finally see Peter (Chris Pratt) meet his dad. Just try to be upset that the galaxy is in danger while watching this.

Read more…



Source: io9 – In the Latest Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Trailer, Star-Lord Meets His Dad

In the Latest Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Trailer, Star-Lord Meets His Dad

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 premiered a brand new trailer tonight. It’s got space battles, dancing, and more Rocket gadgets. Plus, we finally see Peter (Chris Pratt) meet his dad. Just try to be upset that the galaxy is in danger while watching this.

Read more…



Source: Gizmodo – In the Latest Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Trailer, Star-Lord Meets His Dad

Your Fancy Pill-Reminder Box Isn't Helping You Remember Anything

If you’re the type of person that has trouble remembering to say, take your birth control or heart medication every day, technology offers a solution. Pillboxes, these days, are tricked out pieces of tech. For $100 or less, you can buy one that syncs to your phone, reminds you to take your pills, and even tattles on…

Read more…



Source: Gizmodo – Your Fancy Pill-Reminder Box Isn’t Helping You Remember Anything

The Bitch is Back in the New Alien: Covenant Trailer

The latest Alien: Covenant trailer wasn’t supposed to drop until tomorrow, but lookie here: a deeper exploration of the Covenant’s crew and the nature of their mission, a good look at the (weirdly quiet) planet they land on, lots of running and shrieking, and an ominous tag line straight outta Dante’s Inferno.

Read more…



Source: Gizmodo – The Bitch is Back in the New Alien: Covenant Trailer

The Bitch is Back in the New Alien: Covenant Trailer

The latest Alien: Covenant trailer wasn’t supposed to drop until tomorrow, but lookie here: a deeper exploration of the Covenant’s crew and the nature of their mission, a good look at the (weirdly quiet) planet they land on, lots of running and shrieking, and an ominous tag line straight outta Dante’s Inferno.

Read more…



Source: io9 – The Bitch is Back in the New Alien: Covenant Trailer

Why Your Boss Will Crush Your Innovative Ideas

dryriver writes: BBC Capital explores why good ideas people have in the workplace almost never reach the top decision-makers in a company. From the report: “Surely you’ve heard the plea from on high at your company: we want more innovation, from everyone at every level. Your boss might even agree with the sentiment — because, of course, who doesn’t like innovation? It’s good for everyone, right? Yet when it comes to innovating at your job it might be better to lower your expectations — and then some. Your idea is far more likely to die on your boss’s desk than it is to reach the CEO. It’s not that top managers don’t want new ideas. Rather, it’s the people around you — your colleagues, your manager — who are unlikely to bend toward change. Today, big companies that don’t innovate face extinction. ‘Companies are almost forced to say that they are changing these days,’ says Lynn Isabella, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in the U.S. But, ‘it’s not organizations that resist change; people resist,’ says Isabella. ‘The people have to see what’s in it for them.'” As mentioned in the report, some of the key questions that the people whom you pitch your ideas to will ask themselves include, what does this innovation mean for me personally — will it be more challenging or will it lead to more career opportunities, and what will it mean for my job — will I get fired or will it be (or was it) worth it? Many times the answers to these questions don’t stack up in favor of the innovation, Isabella says. As a result, the people who need to buy in don’t push for change.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Why Your Boss Will Crush Your Innovative Ideas

Severe SQL Injection Flaw Discovered In WordPress Plugin With Over 1 Million Installs

According to BleepingComputer, “A WordPress plugin installed on over one million sites has just fixed a severe SQL injection vulnerability that can allow attackers to steal data from a website’s database.” The plugin’s name is NextGEN Gallery, which has its own set of plugins due to how successful it is. From the report: According to web security firm Sucuri, who discovered the NextGEN Gallery security issues, the first attack scenario can happen if a WordPress site owner activates the NextGEN Basic TagCloud Gallery option on his site. This feature allows site owners to display image galleries that users can navigate via tags. Clicking one of these tags alters the site’s URL as the user navigates through photos. Sucuri says that an attack can modify link parameters and insert SQL queries that will be executed by the plugin when the attacker loads the malformed URL. This happens due to improper input sanitization in the URL parameters, a common problem with many WordPress and non-WordPress web applications. The second exploitation scenario can happen if website owners open their site for blog post submissions. Because attackers can create accounts on the site and submit a blog post/article for review, they can also insert malformed NextGEN Gallery shortcodes. Sucuri says the plugin’s authors fixed this flaw in NextGEN Gallery 2.1.79.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Severe SQL Injection Flaw Discovered In WordPress Plugin With Over 1 Million Installs